le cadavre exquis
I took a course on prose poetry back in my undergrad days, and I remember my professor warning us about submitting to an online mag called “Exquisite Corpse.” He said that Exquisite Corpse would accept anything you submitted—so of course our ears perked up (published! hurray!) but would only seriously publish the good submissions and mock the crappy ones. So while I was online at the lib the other day, I decided to check this out.
Apparently taken from the line “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine” (le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau in French—thanks Wikipedia) which was the first product of a surrealist language game similar to ‘Consequences’, Exquisite Corpse publishes both fiction and poetry, as well as book reviews, letters, essays, and sells back issues and compilations of its selections as well as books by Corpse contributors. With skulls, crossbones, and missiles splashed all over the background, it is a bit intimidating, but I decided to jump into a section with abandon, flinging caution to the wind, drink some (very) new wine, and find out about this whole mockery thing.
I browsed through “Anti-Anthropomorphism or: Animals Redeemed,” and from the looks of it, they will print anything. A recent selection:
Love Hurts
Spare me your roses
But bring forth your thorns and let
Me bleed my way home (feelings)
Can I count the ways
I’ve murdered you in my mind
NO—Far too many
Ouch. Corpse’s take: “Gregory Braquet lets us see the true Lassie [this refers to the first poem] then confesses that ‘love hurts’.” I guess the mockery bit is true.
I decided to browse the “Making and Unmaking of Person” section, which sounded promising, where I stumbled upon “Wednesdays” by Lee Ann Mortensen. It’s a piece of flash fiction (or prose poetry… where to draw the line?) and it’s hilarious. I mean laugh out loud funny. But also sort of painfully honest. A woman narrates what her lover wants, listing them off in strained points. An excerpt:
What my lover wants seventh is for us to talk, to say everything and purge ourselves. She closes her eyes and begins.
"I've always wanted another Porsche like my first husband gave me. It was red and fast and got me lots of fucking. But you'll never make enough money. I hate that," she says.
I cough and try to come up with something good. I say, "I don't particularly like your hair, I mean, it's nice hair, nice to touch." I cough a little. "I guess I don't like it after you've been jogging, or when you've put a little too much product in it. It sort of seems too sticky maybe."
She looks at me tightly because I've said "maybe" and I'm not supposed to say "maybe." I'm not supposed to equivocate.
Corpse says: “Lee Ann Mortensen demonstrates how lovers create one another.” I guess they liked it too.
Would I submit to this online mag? Well, definitely not the angsty co-ed scribbles that fill my old notebooks. But it certainly is entertaining as a spectator sport.
1 comment:
Julia,
I’d never heard of the Exquisite Corpse online mag before your posting, but was interested to see how an online site would be designed in order to publish everything that they receive. Part of me wondered how mainstream the site was; if I hadn’t heard of it, how many others are also unaware of it? Publishing all submissions could be conceivable if the amount of work submitted was relatively small.
Ultimately, the set-up of Exquisite Corpse surprised me. For whatever reason, I expected the site’s mockery and support to appear at the end of an author’s piece of writing. However, their opinion appeared with the author’s name and their writing was linked through their name on a different page (so all you saw was the name and opinion, not the name and writing). I found that this design really affected my decision of what to read and what not to read. I browsed through a few pieces that the site mocked, but generally found myself agreeing with their sense of dislike. Often, I thought that the site’s mockery was pretty harsh, but after a while, I started avoiding these pieces altogether. This is presumably, the point, but I really think it takes the site’s mockery to another level. The only reason this site publishes some of the more low-quality work is, quite obviously to inflict their negative judgment on it. The downfall here is that the site’s editors are determining what is good and what it is not and then using this determination to directly impact what visitors to the site read. (Granted, I did seem to generally agree with their opinions, though I’m willing to bet that there are a few pieces the site mocked that I would have genuinely enjoyed.)
The excerpt from Mortensen’s story, “Wednesdays” you include in your posting also drew me to the magazine. I really liked this story, especially some of the sensual elements, like the hot cake baking, which without direct, elaborate description was something that I could imagine and smell. Further, I liked that Wednesday was the day of the week to get through, when stereotypically it was Monday. Just this little switch of detail made the story all the more appealing to me.
Submitting to this online mag seems a bit more daunting than submitting to any other magazine, whether it is print or online, as the rejection is public, rather than through a letter to be opened alone. At this point, I don’t think I feel comfortable enough with my writing to submit it to Exquisite Corpse. Honestly, I’m not sure I will ever feel comfortable enough to open myself up to the chance of mockery. However, I do agree that it provides a certain level of entertainment.
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